How the dictionary definition of success varies from how most people define the word
What it takes to achieve success over the long term
Which three overlapping perspectives generate success
What 'builders' (highly successful people over time) do that is different than the rest of us
Built to Last (Collins, Porras) focused on what accounts for astonishing business success. Success Built to Last (Porras, Emery, Thompson)focuses on success on a personal level, identifying a consistent pattern with people who have achieved the extraordinary. One of the co-authors, Mark Thompson, talks with Karen Elmhirst and explains the three-element pattern that was revealed through 200 interviews and validated with the World Success Survey. Are you seeking more out of your life and/or your career? If so, this interview summary may help you gain clarity on how to move toward achieving your goals.
Mark Thompson is co-author of Success Built To Last. He has two decades of experience as a senior executive, board member, management coach, entrepreneur, author, producer, and investor. As an executive coach and visiting scholar at Stanford University, Mark has led senior teams and organizations through vision, values, and strategy initiatives based on the business classic Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. Much of his coaching, strategic counseling and research springs from his experience as an insider in boardrooms and management committees, along with his passion for unlocking the unique skills of hundreds of remarkable people around the world, from non-profit leaders and billionaires, to the presidents of nations, and the CEOs of small and large international organizations.
Forbes Magazine honored Mark on its list of America’s leading venture investors with the “Midas” touch in 2004. He has been an investor and chairman of many technology and media startups. He worked for a dozen years for his mentor, Charles Schwab, serving in a variety of senior roles, including Chief Communications Officer and later, as Executive Producer of what was in the late 90’s one of the world's largest and most profitable websites, Schwab.com. Mark is a former board member of major private and public companies. He has been a speaker at London Business School, Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley, The Economist, and Fortune Magazine conferences, The New York Stock Exchange summits with The Churchill Club and Financial Executives Institute.
KE: Mark, what prompted you and your co-authors, Jerry Porras and Stewart Emery, to do this research and write this book?
MT: It was a very exciting collaboration because the three of us came from very different backgrounds. Jerry Porras had written Built To Last in the early 90’s, which is still one of the great business classics of all time, and he is retired as a professor at Stanford Business School. Stewart Emery, who had worked in the human transformation movement for 30 years, was actually the first CEO of EST. We all had the same question: What is it that makes for lasting individual success?
We went out and interviewed leaders from all walks of life, from middle managers to chief executives, to academy award winners, Nobel laureates, people who worked in a community, all people who had had an impact on their field or profession for at least 20 years. We did more than 200 interviews with people including Jack Welch, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett; people from government - Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George Bush Senior, John McCain, Nobel laureates, even the Dalai Lama was on the list. On our website (www.successbuilttolast.com) you will find a summary of the people that we interviewed, along with some video clips of those interviews.
Then we went out and did a worldwide survey working with Stanford and Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania and Howard University Researcher, Howard Moscovitz, to try to identify the drivers of lasting success for individuals.
One of the things we looked at was how people define success.
MT: In our survey only 7% of respondents chose fame, money and power as the definition of success. What’s amazing about that is that if you actually look at any of the English dictionaries, whether it's Encarta or the Oxford or American Heritage, and you look up the word “success,” you will find the achievement of goals, which is a good thing, but it also says it is the significant attainment of money, fame, or power.
•Everyone agreed that ‘making a difference’ is success—living a life of personal fulfillment.
•1/3 agreed it was attaining goals
•1/3 felt it was balancing their many passions
•1/3 felt it was serving a cause or mission
•Virtually no one felt it was the attainment of fame, money or power.
When we have conversations with companies and management teams and boards, it really creates considerable heat in the room, because there is a kind of default definition of success that we have in the back of our head, assuming that others may share it. We found that we need to step back for a moment when we work with the management team and think about how each individual defines success. One's personal definition of success determines what motivates you, how you behave and how you work on a team.
We found when we looked at people who had been having an impact for 10, 20 or 30 years in their profession, they looked not only at their goals, but they overlapped them with what had meaning, what mattered in their lives. If you look at meaning and success together, you end up having a much bigger opportunity to have real impact for a very long time.
KE: In your book you talk about three perspectives of success. What are they?
MT: These three perspectives or dimensions were revealed in both the interviews and the quantitative research we did. People tend to look at what matters to them that makes a difference in the world - Meaning. Then there is how you think about and define the passions in your life - ThoughtStyle. There are many passions and we often are struggling to juggle them. I don’t know anybody who isn’t. And then there is action of course, getting things done - ActionStyle. What we found is that, when we did the psychology testing or behavioral testing around this, under pressure each of us tends to have a little bit of a leaning toward one of these three perspectives, or maybe toward two of the three.
In other words, some of us will tend to be very much involved in taking action and getting things done for its own sake. Others of us will always look to what matters and what has meaning and impact that is greater than ourselves, and then others will be very much in love with looking at their passions. They really like to have an opportunity of looking at each of the things that they deeply care about and doing them for their own sake, sometimes whether or not they get things done or have an impact on the larger world. When we are feeling lost or feeling the team floating apart and having a difficulty achieving its goals or sustaining success track records, we found that if we can look at these three issues and overlap them, you will see Success Built to Last.
When you can overlap these three perspectives, then success maintains itself, because then you know you are having an impact that matters and is perhaps larger than yourself as an individual (meaning). It connects with your passion, something you intrinsically love (thoughtstyle), and you are taking steps to get it done (actionstyle). If you are finding yourself or your team unable to sustain success, you may want to take a look at whether one of these things is out of whack, because unfortunately, while overlap is what successful people do, by nature, these three perspectives have a greater tendency to fly apart than to stick together. You have to pay attention to keeping them in alignment.
KE: You refer to people in your book who achieve long-term success as 'builders.' What’s different about the approach that builders take versus the typical person?
MT: We call them builders because that is a throwback to the original Built to Last book. Collins and Porras used a metaphor of a clock builder versus a time teller. These are people who are building something that is sustainable that will outlive them, that is bigger than they are, that is something that they feel the need to be a part of. I thought one of the interesting examples of this came up in the story of John McCain. Here is a person who originally felt that all glory was self-glory. He was a “jet jockey” as he describes himself during Vietnam, and felt he was a real 'hot shot.'
During one of his missions he was shot down and as you probably know the story, he was tortured almost to death, time and time again, as he spent years in a camp there. Since he was one of the Admiral’s sons, his life was spared. But many times he wished it wasn’t because he was beaten so badly, over and over again. As he looks back, he says that he had a transition in his life, and he decided that it was possible to have an identity and still be engaged with something that is greater than himself - something that has a legacy, that has a lasting impact.
He actually has the audacity to say that he is grateful to Vietnam for his experience there in changing his life and allowing him to come back to a life of public service. I had extensive interviews where I talked to many people who have enjoyed great other aspects of money, fame, power, and success, but at the end of the day, it is being connected to a larger goal, in whatever business you are engaged in.
KE: We had our national conference recently and Meg Wheatley talked about her view that the world is experiencing "a crisis of meaning," and she connects it very closely to lack of employee engagement. What do you make of that?
MT: Right, and this is one reason why frankly, I have been involved with the Stanford Venture Lab; here in Silicon Valley, it’s almost unavoidable to be involved in new ventures. That is one reason that small companies that have such great odds against them in terms of competing with the giants, seem to do so well because they have recruited a team of people who are believers. They actually believe in doing something better or doing it a different way. And, frankly, if there is an issue of money, it ends up just being a way of keeping score for those guys. They really care more about having something that has an impact; they would feel badly if they weren’t engaged, and will have a legacy that far outlives them.
The other interesting thing about this that occurs to me is related to our ThoughtStyle. Right now, there is controversy over balance, balance in our personal life, balance in our work life and how to juggle all of these things. We discovered in the research that passion is not balanced, by definition, and the balance that we are really seeking is between meaning, thought and action. You have probably seen the movie City Slickers, where Billy Crystal meets the old cowboy who tells him there is just one thing to do with his life. That ends up being very reassuring for the moment, but you realize that it is impossible. If you are a person, who loves family, you have to have family. If you are a person who has a passion that you love doing, which recharges you, that is also necessary.
KE: I remember an example you gave in your book about Maya Angelou and the number of passions that she is involved in.
MT: She was an actress, a singer, a dancer, a university professor and she basically said if she didn’t get a chance to do a little bit of all of those passions, she wouldn’t be able to give any of her best ones her best. We call it 'peripheral thinking' in the research. This refers to the idea that you have to have a main gig that you are working on, you have your profession, you have that focus, but if you are not taking some time to work directly on it, then you don’t have the ability to get this peripheral thinking where you have a flash of insight that you might not otherwise have.
Everybody has had the feeling where when you have stepped away from a problem for a moment, sometimes the answer presents itself. And of course not the least to mention is the priorities of the people that you might love in your life and need to spend time with them, and have those relationships going as well.
It is a matter of being able to recharge yourself, find answers to questions that may not present themselves when you are looking at them directly and frankly be in a position where you don’t get blindsided. Dick Kovacevich, who is CEO of Wells Fargo, played basketball for years and years and for him, he gets back on the court and he has his flashes of insight. He will miss the shot and wonder what he is missing in the office.
KE: So, rather than asking if someone is experiencing work/life balance, what might be the question that you would ask?
MT: Do you love what you do? It’s dangerous not to do what you love. It sounds so cliché, because it comes up a lot and it seems perhaps to many like a delightful but naïve presentation of reality because we all have to put food on the table. But, what we found with our survey, at the end of the day, is that the only way that people were able to sustain 20- or 30-year terms was by doing something they loved rather than living out a sentence. The person who is half hearted in their work frankly will burn out and more importantly, in a competitive or international environment, there are at least a dozen people out there waiting to take that job. The person who works hardest and the longest hours, often for sustainable periods of time, is the person who has passion about it.
We often think of being loved rather than doing what we love -- In other words, doing what is compliant with the people around us. But, we often first need to go back and think about what is meaningful to us and then look at what is meaningful to the people who matter in our lives, the bosses and loved ones that have their own agenda and their own needs. It really comes down to, are you better at a job that you love and is it going to be more sustainable? When you think about it, have you been better at jobs that you loved than jobs that you weren’t?
KE: We have all heard reference to the book by the title Do What You Love And The Money Will Follow. Is it really that simple?
MT: It is not at all simple. I don’t think there is a person who finds it easy to juggle the passions in their life and yet the challenge is worth it. In other words, what we are saying here is you do have permission, in fact it’s a necessity, to pursue what you love, because there will be someone out there who is in a position to take it from you or to put somebody in there who does love that line of work. So in many ways it isn’t simple at all, and yet there is simplicity in the fact that what you love cannot be defined.
After 20 years of my marriage, my wife and I had a baby, Vanessa, who is now seven. At one point I was really trying to press her to do something at school that I thought that she loved but she was resisting and she said, “You know what Daddy, I can’t explain to you why I like this or do not like this, it’s like trying to explain to you why I like watermelon.” Passions are that way, you just can’t define them that way. She says, “You are not the boss of my likes, you are the boss of taking care of me.” And yes, she is available for consulting, her hourly rate is much better than mine J. Of course, what she is talking about is, you know, in my good intentions, out of complete love, I was actually suggesting that she take singing lessons because she stands in the middle of the classroom and sings. The X-factor is this passion that only you can define for yourself. And when you are doing work that you love, all of a sudden you can work 60 hours. It's what you would secretly do for free.
KE: Listening and talking to others about this topic, I've noticed a perspective that says that work has to be onerous and difficult. It's wrapped up in responsibility and some people seem to feel they can’t enjoy it fully because then it wouldn’t be work.
MT: That is exactly right. Following our passions, doing what we love is one of the hardest things to do because there are so many people around us that naturally have their own agendas as well. So we don’t give ourselves this permission.
We also found that many of the people we interviewed who were doing high impact, high-energy work didn't really see themselves as leaders.
One interesting leader is the woman who started the Gorilla Foundation in California. She is a modern Dr. Dolittle. She taught a gorilla to do sign language. In her role, she has to ask really important people for money. She talks about it this way, she says, “I am so frightened when I get on the phone, or when I’m pitching people on this that I am just full of nerves.” But, when she finally gets them on her favorite topics, which is helping to protect this cousin of humanity, she says all of a sudden, she lets the cause have the charisma, she doesn’t have to have self esteem, she doesn’t have to have a sense of herself being a leader. I found this over and over with people who were introverts.
I talked to Jen-Hsun Huang who runs a video company called Invidia, which created this high-powered video chip. He is a real geeky guy, he is very quiet and he’d rather be at home with his family than being at a meeting or even being interviewed. But, when we talked with him about his favorite topic, he walked over to the computer like it were a shrine and he showed us his work. That is something that has intrinsic meaning to him that is larger than he is. But he would be aching if he weren't doing it.
These are examples of where the cause (for the company or organization or the idea) has meaning bigger than you, enough for you to plug into its energy in a way that you really care about. That is where the Meaning and ThoughtStyle perspectives overlap with each other.
Audience Question: Please clarify the difference between the ThoughtStyle and Meaning perspectives.
MT: This is a real big surprise to us, because generally the idea of a life of passion and a life of purpose and meaning ends up being all used synonymously. You have to do what you love and you have to do something meaningful. Three Fridays ago, I was at the Center for Nonprofit Excellence. Here are people that live in the space of making a difference. That’s the Meaning circle basically, where what you do has impact larger than yourself. You are part of a legacy that you care about. It was interesting because there was a good portion of those people who were embarrassed to tell me they were connected with something that had meaning, that higher purpose, but they were burned out. There was no overlap with ThoughtStyle (passion).
Michael Dell feels like he was transforming the way people buy, they didn’t have to go through the middleman, and they could go direct. That mattered to him. In the early days, he would fix computers in his bathtub at the University of Austin. So even if Dell hadn’t worked out, he would still be in the bathtub assembling computers because that’s his passion. But, his passion (ThoughtStyle) happened to overlap with something that the world viewed as having Meaning - a new way for computers to be sold had an impact larger than Michael Dell.
KE: You include information about your interview with Jimmy Carter - why don't you tell us a bit about his journey to success?
MT: Jimmy Carter thought being president or being in government service was the only thing for him. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school let alone go on to college, where he studied physics and nuclear physics. He grew up surrounded by poverty and he wanted to be in public service. He went on to become Governor and then President of the The United States. When he was President, whether you loved him or hated him, he was a very passionate guy. He was doing things that he cared about. It turns out that, of course, in the 1980 election, he was punished in a humiliating landslide against Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t like the election that we just experienced at the mid terms of the last few presidential elections where hundreds of votes switched. I mean the guy was slammed.
He went into a great depression for quite some time. Then, he eventually went back to what had both meaning and passion for him -- meaning and thought style overlapping. He builds furniture in his spare time (he worked as a carpenter) and does ministry in his church on Sundays. He asked himself, "What do I really care about that is larger than myself and also, what am I naturally passionate about doing?" He rebuilt houses for people who couldn’t afford them, that ended being his work with Habitat for Humanity, which ended up being his work in Africa. Twenty years later, whether you love or hate him as a president, he had enormous impact. It has been 20 years since he was President, he has since won the Nobel Prize and is, in a sense, providing a template for the way ex-presidents can have impact on the world.
We have seen George Bush Senior start programs about six years ago, that are helping communities. He has teamed up with Bill Clinton over Katrina and over the Tsunami before that, and now Clinton has his global initiative. Whether we think that it has to do more with politics or another agenda, the bottom line is that all of these ex-presidents are having a huge impact on the world doing something that is larger than themselves but also connected with their passions - what they would naturally do as an individual.
By the way, we have an assessment tool that is just up and we are starting some course work at John F. Kennedy University. We have our first online course that was just launched on this, it was very successful and we are working with Talent Smart, the people who brought you the emotional intelligence assessment. So, you can go to www.talentsmart.com, and you'll find a quick little assessment that will give you the 36 questions we asked on the World Success Survey. It will help you identify where your leanings are and where you run for reassurance when you are feeling under pressure, meaning, thought or action.
KE: The third and final perspective of success in your model is ActionStyle. Tell us, what do builders do that is different than the rest of us?
MT: The ActionStyle is a category that I started out saying was the easiest one to explain, and then our research team explained to me that this is because I am an ActionStyle guy. I like getting things done. These are people that like to get things done for its own sake, so where I would have to run back for reassurance and for context is to go back to, “How is this connected to a larger cause (Meaning), and how is it connected to what Mark, you would do for free (ThoughtStyle)?” Otherwise, I can just get involved in the fact that I am very effective at accomplishing goals.
So, this gives me a little opportunity to talk about how you probably work with people who have different tendencies toward one of the three perspectives. Those who lean toward ActionStyle are probably the "go to" people on helping to get something done. There are also people who help you get it right, which would probably be the meaning people; connecting the activity to a higher cause. Then there are those people who are good at innovation and thinking about the different ways the project can be accomplished. These are often people who have a leaning in ThoughtStyle. They are really good at coming up with new ideas, because they feel confident and connected to things they just love doing for their own sake.
For me, setting small measurable goals is really important in giving myself a way to pilot and test things, rather than thinking about things having to be perfect. You need feedback from whomever you are surveying, and if you can present the expectations that way, these people who are builders can be very effective as long as you say, “Look, we are learning how to do this, we are trying it out.” That helps people get engaged in what you are doing and feel like they are participating or owning the outcome. As it turns out, if you are connected with something that is fun, if you are connected with something that is meaningful, it is actually easier to get things done, because you do find that you want to do those things.
KE: There has been a movement toward focusing on people’s strengths rather than emphasizing their weaknesses. Your research seems to focus on harvesting both strengths and weaknesses. Can you tell us more about that?
MT: It is what I call using your core incompetence. Naturally, you have to find your strengths, you never would get anywhere in life if you can’t find your strengths and set goals. But the thing here important to know is that builders, people who have been successful for 20 or 30 years, are kind of greedy about using both their assets and their liabilities. People often either dismiss their weaknesses, try and replace them with positive thinking or wallow in self-blame and defeat. Highly successful people do none of these things. They don’t ignore their weaknesses, and they don’t just use them as an opportunity to beat themselves up. They don’t believe that their weaknesses are a natural reason to distrust themselves. We often say that you don’t need a cure, you need an emotional commitment to the difficulties or handicaps that you may feel that you have in your life.
Chuck Schwab failed in many businesses that you never hear about when you hear about this famous billionaire and entrepreneur. He tried a real estate business, he did an investment newsletter, and as it turns out, he is very dyslexic. In other words, he has reading difficulty of reversing words and letters and can’t read a speech. I worked as his chief communications officer for a while. I am also dyslexic, so here we have Chuck Schwab and his communications officer prepared to travel around the world to talk about investing and both of us don’t have a great experience reading a script, so we had to figure out a way to get around that.
What is amazing about this is that rather than just trying to cure himself of this disability and almost getting thrown out of college, he did many things that allowed him to actually differentiate himself and be better and more competitive in the profession. That worked out well for him; he learned to build a team very early, and he needed a study team early in life, he needed an entrepreneurial team early in his business career. When he built a team around him with skills that he didn’t have, it was like getting a personal board of directors. He believes that we all should have that. I think that Napoleon Hill talked about it as a "mastermind network."
Your personal board of directors can help coach you in the areas that you are naturally weakest in. So rather than ignoring your weaknesses, it is nice to know what you’re strong in and what you are weak in and get help from the people around you. The other thing Schwab did was to transform the financial service industry. Given his dyslexia, one of the things he did to cope was to try to make things simple, to break things down into their component parts. He ended up overlapping that skill with a passion, which was investing. He said we can make this simpler and less complex, so people could have one-stop shopping of mutual funds. In a way, he really invented the modern discount brokerage business for the little guy, and so, in essence, it is a good thing he didn’t cure himself of his handicap, because it allowed him to invent the discount brokerage business. I think, otherwise he would just be another investment manager, just another stockbroker.
There is actually a long list of people who are dyslexic: writers, founders, CEOs, people who ended up using that as a way to differentiate themselves that allowed them to do better than they would have ironically, had they not had this so-called handicap.
KE: Most of us are taught to either avoid contention or to smooth it over. Many experts contend that organizations are suffering from lack of innovation because they are not allowing enough healthy debate. You talk in your book about encouraging contention.
MT: It is right up there in political correctness with discovering your strengths and only focusing on those strengths. You need to know about your strengths, but you need to also know about your weaknesses, so that you can get the team around you and then maybe even think differently; which allows you to be innovative or creative in a fresh way based on your weakness. The same is true with contention. It is politically correct now to try to get everybody in full agreement, but one of the things that is always evident in a high-energy, smart, capable team is that there are people there with very strong points of view.
What often happens is, in an attempt to be politically correct, there is not any open vetting of issues and tough conversation at the very beginning of a project or the development of a new idea. So it festers, and it becomes a cancer that can undermine the work later, or just generally lower everybody’s standard of living because it creates politics in an organization. Warren Staley, who is Cargill CEO, runs one of the world’s largest private companies, larger than Dell, Proctor and Gamble, or Microsoft. As a private company, you don’t see their numbers all the time. They have huge impact in hundreds of countries around the world.
They have a staff meeting every week, and Warren said that he wouldn’t invite any outsiders to this meeting because it is just so emotional, and people are pounding the table, and sometimes they have to say, “No stop, Sam is talking now. You will have an opportunity in a moment.” It is an open and contentious environment that he has made safe so that they can actually talk about the real stuff even when it is uncomfortable and politically incorrect. He said if it ever stops being that way he would panic, because there is just too much complexity in his business to allow otherwise. He is able to hang on to the people who often get labelled as prima donnas and have to be edged out because they don’t collaborate “as effectively.” He evaluates how they are contributing to the cause, how they are contributing to overall corporate activities, and if they are in the right role so they can contribute.
People who are just political and don’t want to get things done and get involved with the cause and are just jockeying for position will opt out because if the tough issues are not in secret, it ends up being very effective. It’s another reason why usually small companies can be more effective than big companies in the early days because they are able to have this natural creative wrestling match and not focus so much on personalities, but on issues. And then there are ground rules, basically there can be no retribution and you don’t get into name calling, you always come back to, "Do you have a problem with that person or do we have a problem with this issue and how can we solve this?"
This was a real surprise to us in an environment where people are usually being more politically correct.
KE: What do you mean by the "tripping point"?
MT: Well I am being cute there. Basically, it's a play on Malcolm Gladwell's expression, the "tipping point," where you get to a critical mass in biology or in any social system. You reach a tipping point over which there is an adoption of an idea or a virus takes hold. And I call this the "tripping point" because what we have found is that if you didn’t know better, people who are builders are so good at failures you would think that they were losers. They talk about it all the time, they are experts at it, they obviously know what their strengths are, but when you sit in an executive committee meeting with them you think that they were having a very tough time because they are so self critical even if they are the top in their category or in market share. Because there are always ways to improve on something, which you find has meaning. You never arrive at meaning, you are never done at what matters, and in fact you are never done at what you love doing in terms of a passion either.
So, they aren’t just goals, they aren’t just destinations, they are journeys and that’s the tripping point - often when people start to punish failure. Innovation, by its very nature, is the idea of having small, measurable experiments. Michael Dell talked about this. The startup of his company was a series of experiments, most of which failed, but none of which was big enough to destroy the company and all of which ended up contributing to getting better each time. So, if failure in an organization or on a team in and of itself is punished, you think about it for a moment. When was the last time you were rewarded or promoted for having a noble failure?
It doesn’t happen very much. Jack Welch, who is known as being one of the most difficult, challenging and controversial managers, but also one of the most successful in all time, talked about how when they were trying to launch the long-lasting light bulb at first, it was before its time. Although at the time it was not a market success, he still rewarded those people, still had a big party, people still got bonuses because they had executed well and the market wasn’t ready. Those people continue to get the message that it’s okay to innovate. Because innovation is failure sped up. If you are experimenting, you are having failures, and if it’s not politically correct to fail, then you are going to be in trouble because you can’t innovate unless you have permission to have small, calculated, measurable mistakes.
Richard Branson talks about how when he was starting Virgin Atlantic, he recruited everybody to come to a big launch of the first flight of his new plane. It was supposed to be just an inspection flight but no, he had to invite hundreds of press, all of his employees and put them all on the plane. They are rolling down the runway, they are getting half way down the runway, it just started to take off, it is a brand new 747 and there’s a big explosion, cloud of smoke, and flames. What is it? A bird flew into the engine and blew it up.
The plane was okay, everybody survived, but because he didn’t have approval and he hadn’t gotten insurance because he hadn’t been cleared by the FAA yet on an inspection tour and didn’t get the clearance because the plane had a big problem on the takeoff, the bank wanted to shut him down. So here is a guy who is just trying to start out, doesn’t get his first inspection approval and they want to shut down his company and what does he do? Well he really wants to start an airline that’s going to be very different from what he felt was bad service and achieve that kind of consumer advocacy that he is always going after in a big promotional marketing way, and he looked at this as not a permanent tripping point, but one of his experiments, something that he could learn from, something that he could develop.
You know, it’s another cliché that we hear that you learn from your mistakes and get better each time, but when was the last time you really did that? And so we were encouraged over and over again about how many failures these incredibly successful people have had. Over and over again, failing so much you think they were losers and learning from those mistakes in ways that many of us feel reluctant or wallow in pain over. So, I encourage you to find your own tripping points, I encourage you to find ways to find your own meaning, ThoughtStyle and ActionStyle.
KE: So making the action may be more around piloting and testing versus rolling out.
MT: Exactly, so what you do is you reduce the exposure of that experiment that maybe embrace or engage the customer in saying, “Hey! We are developing this, we care about you, so can we try this together?” Therefore you don’t have the risk to the meaning of the thought circles with the customer groups.
Audience Question: I love my new job but do find that I feel guilty because it does not seem like work all the time. Any suggestions to stay engaged and continue to love my job long term?
MT: Wow, well that’s a high quality problem, isn’t it? You have got an opportunity there if you are doing something that does not feel as much like work and it ends up being play, you are more like Quincy Jones or Jack Welch or Michael Dell. Quite frankly, Maya Angelou would still be writing poetry if it had not worked out that she became famous at it too. So, if you are connected with something that matters to you and it's something that you really love doing, then that’s usually the secret sauce to having enduring success.
If you have any questions or comments do go to www.successbuilttolast.com and you can reach Mark Thompson at mark@successbuilttolast.com.
